Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born on the 19th June 1947, in Bombay, then British India and is an essayist and author of fiction; the scene of his work is often the Indian subcontinent. He became famous for his novels “Midnight’s Children” (1981) and “The Satanic Verses” (1988), and for the latter, he was hit by a fatwa of the Iranian Muslim cleric Khomeini. Rushdie went into hiding for the first ten years and was thereafter under constant British police protection. Rushdie is the winner of various literature awards, including Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, Golden Pen Award, Hutch Crossword Book Award and many others. Salman has been active as a writer since 1975.
How much is the net worth of Salman Rushdie? It has been estimated that the overall size of his wealth is as much as $15 million, as of the data presented in the middle of 2016. Books are main source of Rushdie’s fortune.
Salman Rushdie Net Worth $15 Million
To begin with, Rushdie grew up in Bombay, in the family of a businessman-lawyer and a teacher. Later, he studied history and graduated with honours from King’s College, Cambridge, England. He then worked at advertising agencies (Ogilvy & Mather and Ayer Barker) before devoting himself entirely to literature.
Despite his Indian origins, Rushdie is one of the leading writers of modern English literature. He began his writing career with “Grimus” (1975) part fantasy part science fiction tale, which was generally ignored by the public and critics. His next book, “Midnight’s Children” (1981) brought him literary fame, is considered to be his best work, and had a great impact on Indian and British literature. After the success of “Midnight’s Children”, Rushdie published a short novel “Shame” in 1983. Here he gives a picture of the political turmoil in the independent Pakistan; both works are characterized by their magic realist style and approach to the Indian subcontinent from the perspective of the immigrant.
In 1988, “The Satanic Verses” was released. The book mixes the Quran with Bollywood, which led to controversy on a global scale, such that in the summer of 1989, a bomb was exploded in London’s Paddington that was meant for Rushdie. The British government banned a Pakistani movie, in which Rushdie is depicted as a casino owner who wants to overthrow the Pakistani government. Rushdie was against this ban and praised the scenes of the film. His fame and net worth were both growing.
Thereafter Rushdie’s horizon widened: besides India and Pakistan, he brought the Western world into the picture – “The Moor’s Last Sigh” (1995) addresses the cultural and trade relations between India and the Iberian Peninsula. Four years later in “The Ground Beneath her Feet” (1999), the rock ‘n’ roll scene in the background of the USA is described. “Fury” (2001) takes mostly place in the USA, and is about New York during the height of America’s wealth and power. In the novel, “Shalimar the Clown” (2005) Rushdie discusses the problems of the state of Kashmir, which is disputed by India and Pakistan. In his autobiographical novel – “Joseph Anton” (2012) – the author describes the events of his life under the ongoing fatwa as well as this friendships with other authors. He emphasized among other things that the events had not changed him as a writer. Recently, “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” (2015) was released, a story again set in New York.
Rushdie was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993; this is the award for the best novel in 25 years to win a Booker Prize.
Finally, in the personal life of the author, Rushdie has been married four times, including to Clarissa Luard (1976–1987) with whom he has a son; Marianne Wiggins(1988–1993); Elizabeth West (1997–2004) which produced another son; and finally to date, to Padma Lakshmi(2004–2007).
Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, Golden Pen Award, Writers’ Guild Award, Hutch Crossword Book Award, Winner of Booker Prize (1981), Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union, Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France (1999
Nominations
Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours (2007), Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), James Tait Black Prize, European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes (Britain, Germany)
Movies
Midnight's Children, Then She Found Me, Concerning the Bodyguard, Paperback Dreams, Odd Streets Run West, Great Writers: Salman Rushdie
TV Shows
Next People
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Quote
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[Comment on the Fatwa] I wish I'd written a more offensive book...
2
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force of liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. "Respect for religion" has become a code phrase meaning "fear of religion". Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and yes, our fearless disrespect.
3
The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
4
The lessons learned at school are not necessarily those the school thinks it's teaching.
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[on how he managed to weather the storm over 'Satanic Verses'] Just by being bloody-minded. I think I'm tougher than I thought I was. One of the things...was that I just wanted to be myself... to keep writing books I wanted to write. I think, if you knew nothing about my life story, if you'd never seen anything about my life and all you had was my books to look at, there isn't a great rift in 1989. It's not that writing after that is radically different in the writing before that. I think [it] has its own continuity, and I've tried very hard to do that.
6
[on a forced shutdown in Sri Lanka during the filming of 'Midnight's Children'] We lost two day's shooting and a lot of sleep. It's clear that there was somebody in the Iranian foreign ministry - I don't know who, and I don't know at how high a level it was, but someone - said to the Sri Lankan ambassador they they disapproved of the permission having been given [to film] and that it should be revoked. Fortunately Deepa [Mehta] as part of the process of planning the film, had personally been to see the president of Sri Lanka [as a project for]trying to develop the film industry in Sri Lanka, develop it as a location for filming, and that they saw this as being a kind of showcase for that. So they were very supportive of it.. The moment we got to the president's office he said, 'No,of course you must make your film'.
7
Education changes the world. If you have generations of children being brought up in extremist madrasas to believe that that world view is the correct world view, then you create generations of people with built-in hostilities. Even if nothing had happened to exacerbate those hostilities, even if there had not been an Iraq war, the mindset of generations, particularly of young men, has been badly affected. You see that anti-semitism is taken for granted, and that a highly misogynistic world view is propagated, where the role of women is cast as secondary. And when you get to other issues like the treatment of religious minorities or sexual minorities, there's a fantastic hostility. So you're bringing up generations of bigoted children.
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You can't be elected dog-catcher in America unless you're a Christian. For someone like me who spent a lot of his adult life in England and western Europe,it's probably the biggest single difference between the United States and the rest of the western democracies.
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I still refuse to call it 'Mumbai', as do many people who live there. It's not ancient like Delhi, with thousands of years of history. Essentially it's a city the British built because they thought the natural harbour would be useful to the navy. They reclaimed land to join together seven islands into what is now the peninsula of south Bombay, then they built a fort and the city grew around it.
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Fact
1
According to the memoir "Joseph Anton", Keith Vaz MP promised Rushdie support over the phone, and then supported a protest against him.
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Mentioned in Theresa Rebeck's play "Seminar".
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New York City, New York [June 2007]
4
Helped pick the phrase "naughty but nice" as an advertising slogan to sell cakes in 1970s Britain.
5
He was awarded a British Knighthood in the 2007 Queen Elizabeth II's Birthday Honors List for his services to Literature.
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His book "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" was written for his son Zafar while he was in hiding, and they could not meet.
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Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 133, pp. 379-388. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.
8
He is the father with Clarissa of Zafar Rushdie, born 1980, and with Elizabeth of Milan Rushdie, born 1999.
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Sentenced to death in 1989 for his book "The Satanic Verses" by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed the book to be an insult to the Islamic religion. He has lived under police protection ever since. Since the Ayatollah's death, he has become a slightly more public person.